Does the early bird really catch the worm, or end up healthy, wealthy, and wise? Can some people really exist on just a few hours' sleep a night? Does everybody dream? Do fish dream? How did people cope before alarm clocks and caffeine? And is anybody getting enough sleep? Even though we will devote a third of our lives to sleep, we still know remarkably little about its origins and purpose. Paul Martin's Counting Sheep answers these questions and more in this illuminating work of popular science. Even the wonders of yawning, the perils of sleepwalking, and the strange ubiquity of nocturnal erections are explained in full. To sleep, to dream: Counting Sheep reflects the centrality of these activities to our lives and can help readers respect, understand, and extract more pleasure from that delicious time when they're lost to the world.

This is a fun rhyming story about how a little girl thinks out of the box to solve a problem.

Counting sheep is supposed to help you sleep—but a room full of yaks, alpacas, and llamas would keep anyone awake in this counting book with a comical twist. Winner of the Mathical Book Prize! A glass of warm milk, reading, working on her knitting—nothing can help Clarissa get to sleep. When even counting sheep doesn't help her doze off, she tried pairs of alpacas instead. Two, four, six . . . then llamas by fives . . . then yaks by tens! But no one could sleep with a room full of bouncing, bleating, shedding animals. Determined to unravel her problem so she can get some sleep, Clarissa counts back down until she's all alone, and she can finally get some rest. Introducing addition and subtraction by ones, twos, fives, and tens, Sheep Won't Sleep is part bedtime story, part math practice— and the hilarious illustrations of spotted, striped, and plaid animals are sure to appeal to imaginative readers of all ages.

Sheep are the thread that runs through the history of the English countryside. Our fortunes were once founded on sheep, and this book tells a story of wool and money and history, of merchants and farmers and shepherds, of English yeomen and how they got their freedom, and above all, of the soil. Sheep have helped define our culture and topography, impacting on everything from accent and idiom, architecture, roads and waterways, to social progression and wealth. With his eye for the idiosyncratic, Philip meets the native breeds that thrive in this country; he tells stories about each breed, meets their shepherds and owners, learns about their past - and confronts the present realities of sheep farming. Along the way, Philip meets the people of the countryside and their many professions: the mole-catchers, the stick-makers, the tobacco-twisters and clog-wrights. He explores this artisan heritage as he re-discovers the countryside, and finds a lifestyle parallel to modern existence, struggling to remain unchanged - and at its heart, always sheep.

This unusual anthology demonstrates the range of possibilities in nature writing with contributions from Charles Bowden, Julian Hayden, Danny Lopez, Charles Sheldon, Ann Zwinger, and others". Essential reading for naturalists and conservationists. Highly recommended".--Library Journal.

When three little kittens cannot sleep their mother suggests they count sheep, so all three set out to find some to count.

A paper reprint of the 1982 agricultural history of Eastern Washington and the McGregor operations. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)